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It’s that time of year again when all the Calzona blogs slowly transform into Rizzles blogs.
Like a gay butterfly.
Let’s say for a second that you have a gluten allergy. And because your mother’s gone a lot, you visit your grandmother every day after school. And she makes cookies every day for you and your siblings. But most of the time, she forgets you have a gluten allergy and just makes normal cookies, day in and day out. You eat them anyway, it’s impolite to refuse food, and before they make you sick, they taste good.
Eventually, your grandmother notices there’s a problem. You’re getting sick from the cookies she makes for you and all your siblings and she discovers you have a gluten allergy and so, she decides to make you one or two cookies that you’re actually able to eat and they don’t make you sick. The first couple recipes she tries are bland, or just straight up bad, but eventually she makes some really good ones. Ones that taste almost the same as, if not better than, the gluten cookies which make you sick,.
And some days, a lot of days, she still screws up and makes just the gluten cookies, but you forgive her, because the cookies with gluten are good, and she’s your grandma and you love her. Any time you complain about the lack of cookies you can eat, your siblings tell you ‘grandma’s cookies taste so good they don’t /need/ to be gluten free’ and call you a baby every time you beg your grandma to make you gluten free cookies.
Sometimes, your grandma will even add something like sprinkles, a lot of which have gluten, to otherwise gluten free cookies just to make the other kids happy.
But, one day, your siblings ask your grandmother ‘hey, grandma, can we make ourselves cookies?’ and your grandmother agrees, ‘okay, kids, you can make cookies.’
So, your siblings make cookies. You make a really tasty chocolate chip recipe replacing the wheat flour with rice flour. Your siblings get all mad and say that you’re not sticking to the recipe because you changed the recipe to be gluten free and that you should stick to the original recipe if you want to be any good.
But then, they ask your grandmother for your favorite gluten free recipe so they can make it for themselves. But they add a lot of things that aren’t gluten free to the recipe and they even make it with wheat flour. They change a lot of things about the cookie that makes it special. They try them and they say their the tastiest things ever. And no one tells them they ruined the original recipe. When they see you get mad, they say, ‘hey, you made those gluten free chocolate chip cookies! It’s the exact same thing.’
The difference is how everyone reacts to them. It’s a lot like queer representation and the changing of sexuality in the media and fanfic. Or representation of non-white characters in the media and their racebending, either to make them more diverse or to turn them white.
When you’re a minority and you only have very few characters, you’re going to be very protective of them, so when, for example, Moffat makes Clara’s relationship with a girl a phase, or a fan makes Charlie Bradbury straight, or Benedict Cumberbatch gets to play a part originally cast for a non-white actor or someone draws Katara and draws her much, much lighter, so she looks white, that really hurts because we so rarely get characters even slightly like us.
Whereas, when characters are raceflipped to be, say, Asian-American instead of white, or people write slash fic, we’re fighting to get just a few more cookies that don’t hurt us to eat.
